Thursday, September 12th 2013
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Western Digital Rolls Out WD Green 4 TB 3.5-inch Hard Drive
Keeping up with its product roadmaps, Western Digital rolled out WD Green 4 TB hard drive (model: WD40EZRX). Designed for personal desktops that need energy-efficient, high-capacity storage, the drive offers 4000 GB of unformatted space, which should yield about 3.6 TB under a Windows NTFS file-system. Built in the 3.5-inch form-factor, the drive features SATA 6 Gb/s interface, variable sub-6,000 RPM spindle-speeds, 64 MB cache, and acoustics management. When spinning and idling, the drive is designed to draw about 3.3W, which goes up to 4.5W under stress, and just 0.4W, when the drive is parked and spun-down. Available now, the WD Green 4 TB is priced between $170 and $190, depending on what package you choose.
13 Comments on Western Digital Rolls Out WD Green 4 TB 3.5-inch Hard Drive
Ive been running a 2TB green drive for close to 3 years in my pc and never had any issues. there are ways to fix their spin down times though which greatly increases their lifespan if used in a NAS which powers drives down when not in use
Greens are fine for normal desktop use. and placed inside a enclose for use as an external drive.
This has been a major misunderstanding caused by marketing speak that proves difficult to decipher. From the beginning of the Green series, masses have believed that these drives can actually change the speed. THIS IS NOT TRUE. There are plenty of reviews (see SCPR, storagereview...) that have proven this claim to be UNTRUE. WD itself has never published official speeds (at least so far) but only claimed the drive are somehow optimized. Optimized = slower, but constant RPM. That is all. Of course, just like any modern HDD, WD Green can stop alltogether and then spin up. But this is 1 or 0, not in between.
So far only selected Hitachi drives can change RPM during operation - see Hitachi CinemaStar 5K1000. Can't say if this is the only one or Hitachi have introduced more such drives.
Please, get this right, let's kill this myth that WD spawned.
BUT!!!
Their WD GP / Green marketing efforts are, to say the least, shady. If they've stepped up and clarified this RPM issue once and for all, that would only help them gain more cred. For now, I'll hold it against them.
The only difference is the firmware loaded on each, mainly the Red drives support TLER, which makes them suited for RAID.